Monday, January 23, 2012

CLAY, Ala. (AP) — Two people were killed in the Birmingham, Ala., area as storms pounded the South and Midwest, prompting tornado warnings in a handful of states early Monday.

At least one of the areas affected by the storms, which were part of a system that stretched from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico, was also hit by a line of killer storms that slammed the Southeast last April.

Jefferson County sheriff's spokesman Randy Christian said a 16-year-old boy was killed in Clay and an 82-year-old man died in the community of Oak Grove.

Storm in Birmingham, Alabama

The storm produced a possible tornado that moved across northern Jefferson County around 3:30 a.m., causing damage in Oak Grove, Graysville, Fultondale, Center Point, Clay and Trussville, Christian said. He said several homes were destroyed and numerous injuries were reported.

"Some roads are impassable, there are a number of county roads where you have either debris down, trees down, damage from homes," said Yasamie Richardson, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Emergency Management Agency. Jefferson County experienced "significant damage," she said.

Oak Grove was also hit during last April's tornadoes, but none of homes hit in April were hit again this time, said Allen Kniphfer of Jefferson County's Emergency Management Agency.

As day broke, rescue crews used chainsaws to clear fallen trees off roads in Clay, northeast of Birmingham. Searchers went door-to-door calling out to residents, many of whom were trapped by trees that crisscrossed their driveways.

Stevie Sanders woke up around 3:30 a.m. and realized bad weather was on the way. She, her parents and sister hid in the laundry room of their brick home as the wind howled and trees started cracking outside.

"You could feel the walls shaking and you could hear a loud crash. After that it got quiet, and the tree had fallen through my sister's roof," said Sanders, 26.

The family was OK, and her father, Greg Sanders, spent the next hours raking his roof and pulling away pieces of broken lumber.

"It could have been so much worse," he said. "It's like they say, we were just blessed."

In Clanton, about 50 miles south of Birmingham, rescuers were responding to reports of a trailer turned over with people trapped, City Clerk Debbie Orange said.

Also south of Birmingham, Maplesville town clerk Sheila Haigler said high winds damaged many buildings and knocked down several trees. One tree fell on a storm shelter, but no one was injured, Haigler said. One person was trapped in a heavily damaged home, but was rescued safely. Haigler said police had not been able to search some areas because trees and power lines were blocking roads.

In Arkansas, there were possible tornadoes in Arkansas, Dallas, Lonoke, Prairie and Cleveland counties Sunday night. The storms also brought hail and strong winds as they moved through parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, Illinois and Mississippi.

Tornado warnings were issued for parts of Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama.

The storm also caused officials to reschedule a planned Monday meeting in Montgomery to receive a study on Alabama's response to a system of storms that raked the state last April. That storm killed more than 240 people in the state. Among the hardest hit areas then was Tuscaloosa, where 50 were killed.

Rescue workers help a family out of their neighborhood after a severe storm ripped through the Trussville, Ala. area early Monday, Jan. 23, 2012. Tornado warnings were issued in parts of central and northern Alabama in the early morning hours Monday as powerful storms rolled across the state. There were several reports of severe damage to homes.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

MEXICO CITY -- The Mexican army announced Sunday that it had captured the head of security for Sinaloa drug cartel head Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, one of the world's most wanted men.

The suspect, who was not identified by name, was captured in the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan and will be presented to the media Monday morning, the army said.

Guzman, Mexico's top drug lord, is one of the world's richest men, and has eluded authorities by moving around and hiding since his 2001 escape from prison in a laundry truck.

The army said the man they had arrested also ran cartel activities in Durango and southern Chihuahua state, and was responsible for carrying out secret burials of cartel victims, kidnapping, extortion and arson. They did not say if the arrest moved the military closer to capturing Guzman, an arrest that would be seen as a major victory for the government of President Felipe Calderon.

Guzman is worth more than $1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which has listed him among the "World's Most Powerful People." He has a $7 million bounty on his head, and thousands of law enforcement agents from the U.S. and other countries working on capturing him.

His cartel controls cocaine trafficking on the Mexican border with California and has moved eastward to the corridor between the Mexican state of Sonora, which borders Arizona.

Separately, Mexican soldiers discovered 13 bodies in an abandoned truck Sunday along with a message that they were killed in a war between rival drug cartels in the eastern state of Veracruz, officials said.

The bodies were found in Tamaulipas state, a few hundred yards (meters) from its border with Veracruz, according to the Tamaulipas attorney general's office. The office said that 10 of the bodies had been decapitated.

The area has been the scene of bloody battles between the Gulf and Zetas cartels, and a pair of banners alluding to a rivalry were found in the truck, the statement from the attorney-general's office said.

On Friday, the attorney general's office in Veracruz said it had found 10 bodies in a different area along the border with Tamaulipas after receiving a tip.

On Thursday, three U.S. citizens traveling to spend the holidays with their relatives in Mexico were among those killed in a spree of shooting attacks on buses. In the spree, a group of gunmen attacked three buses in Veracruz, killing a total of seven passengers.

The Americans killed were a mother and her two daughters who were returning to visit relatives in the region.

The five gunmen who allegedly carried out the attacks were later shot to death by soldiers.

Earlier, the gunmen also killed four people in the nearby town of El Higo, Veracruz.

Local police in Veracruz have become so corrupt that on Wednesday the government decided to dissolve the entire force in the state's largest city, also known as Veracruz, and sent the Navy in to patrol. Some 800 police officers and 300 administrative employees were laid off.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

MEXICO CITY — The bound and gagged bodies of 26 men were found early Thursday in abandoned vehicles in Guadalajara, a grim sign of escalating mafia violence among gangsters vying for control of Mexico’s second-largest city.

Investigators from the state of Jalisco said that the corpses were stuffed in three vehicles left near the Millennium Arches, a major landmark, and that each of the dead had been shot in the head.

The discovery came less than 24 hours after a similarly grisly scene in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, where the charred remains of 16, some of them handcuffed and wearing bulletproof vests, were left in two pickups. Investigators are looking into a possible connection to Thursday’s crime scene.

“These barbaric acts show that the war between the criminals is getting even more brutal,” said Jorge Aristoteles Sandoval, Guadalajara’s mayor.

Guadalajara has not been among the places considered major Mexican drug-war battlegrounds, such as Ciudad Juarez or Monterrey. But analysts say Thursday’s discovery could signal a new push by the Zetas cartel into territory that has long been the domain of the Sinaloa Federation, the reigning criminal power along Mexico’s western coast.

Luis Carlos Najera, Jalisco state police chief, told reporters that a message was left in one of the vehicles, a white van with license plates from the state of Mexico. But he did not disclose the contents of the message.

Drug-war experts say the Zetas may be muscling into Guadalajara to fight for a bigger piece of Mexico’s billion-dollar methamphetamine trade. Local Sinaloa boss Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel was killed by Mexican soldiers in the city in July 2010. Since then, factional fighting has broken out among groups of gangsters with shifting loyalties and names, such as the Resistance, the New Jalisco Cartel and the Milenio Cartel.

The gruesome spectacle Thursday comes at an inopportune time for Guadalajara, which is two days away from hosting an expected 600,000 visitors for the annual Guadalajara International Book Fair, billed as the largest in the Spanish-speaking world.